Trump’s war on Texas – HoustonChronicle.com

EL PASO — Ports blockaded. Threats of international economic sanctions. Internment camps. Barbed wire. Military buildups. National emergencies.

No, we’re not talking about North Korea, Iran or Russia. We’re talking about Texas. Texas is under attack — by Donald Trump. He is on his way to costing Texas more in his war on the border than the United States is costing Russia through its sanctions. And it’s happening now.

You might think the war analogy is a little strong. But blockades and quarantines are acts of war; troop build-ups and embargoes are preludes. Imagine the Coast Guard blocking shipping into Miami to halt Cuban migrants. Or the Air Force clamping a no-fly zone over the airports of New York to end visa overstays. Or a Navy quarantine of the West Coast to stop fentanyl from China.

Unthinkable, right? Yet something similar is happening right here in Texas. Elsewhere these would be seen as acts of aggression. But because the border gets ignored, it’s gone unremarked. Trump isn’t just cutting off the lifeblood of cities like El Paso and Laredo. He is crippling trade, scaring off untold investment, and verging on damaging nearly 10 percent of the Texas economy. And the state’s Republican political leadership? They have all cut and run.

The Pentagon will soon have more troops deployed in Texas than in Syria. The president’s policies have temporarily shut down bridges from here into Mexico. Failed policies and poor planning are bogging down shipping. A $40 million detention camp is going up on the flanks of the Franklin Mountains in Northeast El Paso.

And it’s not going to stop: Trump’s rage at the border, and Texas by extension, is the centerpiece of his 2020 re-election campaign. He’s repeatedly said he’s considering busing migrants all over the country to punish so-called sanctuary cities and has even reportedly told top aides to push harder on immigration even if it means breaking the law, since he’ll pardon them if they are caught. And he threatens tariffs and an outright trade embargo on border trade with Mexico.

Yet remember: The Texas border is Texas. Nearly 1 in 10 Texans live on the border. Nearly $230 billion of NAFTA trade passes through their cities, , accounting for 1 million jobs. In El Paso, auto parts and computer keyboard springs cross the border up to seven times before winding up in a finished good. As far away as Houston, steel manufacturing feeds a supply chain across North America in the continent’s global contest with Asia, led by China.

With so much at stake, any significant slowdown will cost Texas $30 billion per quarter, according to economist Ray Perryman. Over a year, the president could evaporate $120 billion from the state’s $1.8 trillion economy. To put that into perspective, U.S. sanctions against Russia — for its invasion of Ukraine — only cost Moscow $1 billion per year.

This week marks a month of bridge delays here and all along the border. At 6:00 a.m. Tuesday drivers of passenger cars waited nearly four hours to cross a bridge. But time is money, and along the entire 2,200-mile border, trade is measured at $1 million per minute, according to the Wilson Institute. A third of that flows through Texas. So when the administration closed the bridges over the border five weeks ago, truck wait times soared 500 percent. Based on the Wilson Institute figures, I estimate that nearly $1.6 billion in goods didn’t make it on time.

“The cost of transportation went up for those products,” said Thomas Fullerton, an economist at the University of Texas at El Paso, who compared it to the shipping disruptions right after 9-11. Trucking companies pass on those costs or eat them. “The reliability of the NAFTA-era supply chains is being damaged. At some point customers begin to think that this is just too big of a headache.”

That is happening now. Mariam Kotkowski had as many as 15 trucks crossing weekly. Now that’s been cut to just four or six. Her shipping company, Omega Trucking in nearby Sunland Park, New Mexico, has raised rates 33 percent as drivers idle six to 28 hours.

“It’s clear that it’s orchestrated,” a frustrated Kotkowski said. “It’s like we are in a different country.”

Last week, 15,000 trucks were stranded on the Mexican side of the border, according to Mexican press reports, and manufacturers there are shipping goods by air. In the short term, payrolls in El Paso have failed to keep pace with the expanding national economy, according to Fullerton. In the long term, the damage of Trump’s war is lasting. By repeatedly and falsely proclaiming a security crisis, he is driving investment away, though border cities are among the safest in the country.

“Every single time, almost without exception, the business world asks about safety,” said Jon Barela, the CEO of the Borderplex Alliance, the region’s economic development organization. “We have a high capacity for job growth, but it’s lowered because of the perception that we are a violent frontier.”

“It’s hurt our opportunities,” he continued, “because we don’t even get a look.”

The largest exporter not just to Mexico but to the world, Texas has been sitting atop all other states.

“However, the state’s comparative advantage in the global marketplace has come under growing pressure,” according to a new report by Jesus Canas and Stephanie Gullo of the Dallas Federal Reserve . “A shift in U.S. trade and tariff regulations threatens to directly and indirectly contribute to increasing costs for many leading Texas export sectors that could benefit competitors.”

So this is economic war. Yet Texas Republican Greg Abbott is AWOL. He has been against so-called sanctuary cities and for Trump’s military deployment. In his inaugural address in January, he mentioned the border exactly zero times. He has lip-synced the line that a border wall isn’t just a physical wall. Yet he has abandoned landowners to Trump’s national emergency declaration, allowing him to take their land.

In sharp contrast, other governors have acted. California aided its cities taking in Central American migrants. Considering Trump’s national emergency a farce, New Mexico withdrew its National Guard from the border. Only Arizona’s Republican Gov. Steve Ducy has been as deft at appeasement as Abbott.

Other Texas leaders have been outright collaborators. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick practically drew Trump a map of where to build a wall and even offered Texas taxpayer money to finance it. Sen. John Cornyn used to restrict the use of eminent domain. Sen. Ted Cruz used to preach the value of small, constitutionalist government. Yet both have backed Trump’s war on Texas with their votes, which count far more than their pearl-clutching.

The border is Texas. And Texas is, in large part, the border. Without it, Texas would have just been another hot, landlocked Southern state with a Midwestern identity crisis like — God forbid — Oklahoma. Cowboys were vaqueros first. Two expeditions originating in Mexico, in 1598 and then 1721, permanently and extensively settled the Southwest and Texas with Europeans.

They also carved routes that would carry goods and people for centuries. Oxen pulled carts north. Americans followed them south for invasion into Mexico. Mexicans migrated up looking for work. Now people make 350 million legal border crossings a year. These old routes have become Interstates 35, 10 and 25, and are now jammed with 2.5 million truck crossings.

And once more, people, have followed these routes, this time up from Central America. Many are not undocumented immigrants but legal applicants for asylum. To address them, there are rational remedies: tending to families, hiring more immigration judges, being smarter on foreign policy and yes, changing the laws to stop them, if you like — something only Congress can do.

But to punish more than 2 million Texans for living on the border? To ruin the Texas economy?

Only a president at war with Texas would do that.